The use of electromagnetically-coupled transducers for commercial transaction processing has become increasingly popular in recent times. The advent of compact, inexpensive electronics, transponder-equipped point of sale equipment, and attendant information processing assets have enabled a variety of vendors to offer account-linked transaction systems. Those systems include, for example, subway or other transportation devices, telephone calling devices, and others such as the SpeedPass™ offered by Mobil Corp. for gasoline point of sale transactions. In that and other systems, a receiver emits electromagnetic signals to a device in proximity to a gasoline pump over radio frequencies (RF), activating an embedded transponder within the transaction device. The transaction device is identified by some sort of identification information, which information is then relayed from the point of sale to an offsite information processing facility. However, these types of distributed systems suffer from more than one disadvantage.
For one, transactions made according to that technology require that separate offsite computing facilities be accessed, since the transponder in encoded with information identifying the transponder but not the account information necessary to complete the transaction. Processing times and time to completion of transactions are therefore increased, and the expense of linking and maintaining information processing facilities to service the point of sale request is significant. Moreover, the initiation of new accounts to use such wireless vending points requires backend processing facilitates to enter a new user's account to the remote data processing facility, as well as to encode and associate the transponder with particular new accounts. More streamlined, convenient and flexible transaction technology is desirable.